More stuff......A Wretched and Precarious Situation :In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier. David Welky.The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State...Graeme WoodThe Art of Invisibility Kevin Mitnick......and Atlas Obscura for fun.

Currently into the military exploits (or lack thereof) as performed by General George Brinton McClellan, to whit:

To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign, 1862 - Stephen A. SearsLandscape Turned Red: the Battle of Antietam - same author

Having worked at the Yorktown National Park and at Williamsburg, I can attest to the fact that though McClellan's strategy of an end run thru Jeff Davis' side door looks like a winner on paper, the terrain and weather of the Virginia peninsula in middle to late spring is anything but 1) passable due to heavy rainfall as this time of year and 2) a freakin' pesthole for all kinds of disease from typhoid fever to dysentery. Of course, this is the same McClellan whose supposed genius for planning got him a pontoon bridge for the Harper's Ferry campaign whose pontoons were six inches too wide to fit thru the locks of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles that followed are an example of a man letting his imagination run away with him

Had a chance to wander over what is left of the Antietam (or Sharpsburg, pace to my Southern brethren) battlefield last year, and was amazed at how much of the battlefield could be seen from the location of McClellan's command post. The whole battle - terrain, units, explosions, casualties, the works all laid out before Little Mac like Napoleon's chess board. Instead of winning the war in an afternoon, what McClellan got was a draw and a butcher's bill of over 22,000 casualties on both sides, all created to no purpose, and three more years of blood, pain, and wrath. Antietam is the work of a man who, in the final analysis, could not make up his mind.

The Antietam battlefield park itself is a classic example of what happens when you let property developers get first crack at a historic area. Compare it to Gettysburg, which is as fixed in its historicity as a fly in amber.

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